Outside assistance rules decide marathons more often than people think

Taking a gel from the wrong hand can end a race, and the enforcement depends entirely on which camera was pointed where.

A bottle handed over by someone standing two metres outside a designated table is, under the letter of the rules, assistance. Disqualification follows. Sometimes.

Road running has an unusually strict tradition here, inherited from an amateur era that cared a great deal about self-sufficiency, and the modern version sits awkwardly on a sport where elite fuelling is a planned operation involving personalised bottles with individual markings placed at intervals along a course. The rule permits refreshment at official stations. It forbids receiving aid from a companion, a coach, or a supporter, and it treats pacing help outside the permitted structure the same way.

The problem is not the principle. The problem is that the principle is enforced by observation, and observation is uneven. On a televised elite course the tables are filmed and the officials are numerous. Half a kilometre later, in a stretch with a single marshal and a crowd four deep, a bottle changing hands is a coin flip as to whether it registers with anyone. So the rule binds hardest on the athletes at the front, who are visible, and barely at all in the middle of the field, where it is broken constantly and cheerfully by people whose family are standing at the eighteen mile mark with a flapjack.

I would not mind that inconsistency if the sanctions were proportionate, but they are not. A missed bottle at a table is a real problem for someone with a carbohydrate plan built around a specific intake per hour, and an athlete who then accepts a spare from a training partner has committed an offence carrying the same label as cheating.

Some federations have already softened this, permitting personal drinks to be handed over by an accredited team member at official stations. That is the right direction and it should go further. Let anyone take fluid or fuel from anyone, anywhere, and reserve the assistance rule for what it should always have covered: physical support, pacing by a non-competitor, and anything that moves the athlete forward.

Nutrition is not an advantage in the way a push up a hill is. Treating it as one is a rule inherited from a sport that thought eating during a race was slightly vulgar.